The reporting about the presidential candidates is tiring. Journalists are diving deep into the ‘real’ issues. They explain in detail the concepts this or that candidate presents about health insurance, farm subsidies or trivialities like waging wars.
But nobody cares for this stuff. Too many reports are about the issues the candidates stand for. Voters don’t bother to read them. They’d rather want to know about the candidates legs.
We are therefore thankful to WaPo’s talented Robin Givhan deep meditation on the candidate who is Wearing the Skirt:
The mind, so easily distracted by things mauve and lemon yellow, strays from more pressing concerns to ponder the sartorial: How many skirts does Rudi Giuliani have in his closet? And does he ever wear them in the same combination more than once?
[…]
Men have come a long way from the time when wearing a skirt was considered "borrowing from the girls." So it would be highly regressive to suggest that the candidate is using skirts to heighten the perception that he is not only tough as a man. And yet . . .
[…]
Is even considering the former mayor’s clothes a kind of chauvinistic assault? Or is it merely the intellect trying to wrangle some sort of order out of the imagination? Oh, the tumult!
[…]
Those are the color choices of someone who not only wants to stand out, but is happy to do so in a palette that is quintessentially male. Those are not the typical color choices of East Coast chardonnay swillers, for whom black is a symbol of sophistication and Élan. Bold colors are more common in the vast midsection and southern parts of the country. Giuliani-the-human-color-wheel is wooing Ohio and Florida.He also has made a clear visual distinction between himself as mayor and as presidential candidate. As mayor, he played to tradition, dutifully wearing pants of an unflattering length and jackets shaped like a rectangle. But now it is not so far-fetched to believe that his wardrobe is a way of reminding voters that a man can have as much peacock bravado as the girls.
Now, can’t she write?
But it is fiction. Givhan didn’t opine on Giuliani’s drag nor on Fred Thompson’s cleavage. She is simply bothered by Hillary Clinton being a woman. Something that goes much deeper than any policy issue.
But while she is at that, musing about Giuliani would make much more sense.
Mayor’s Inner Circle Press Roast 2000
Video’s:
Rudy Giuliani with Donald Trump
He’s Da Man!
He Feels Pretty
Slideshow:
Rudy in Leather and Lace